The Tsunami File (28 page)

It was a very good place, in fact, to think about Klaus Heinrich and Stasi and Cold War and Thailand and sudden tsunami waves and disaster victims and identities hidden, lost or found. Everything in a place like, on a night like this, was a good story, a front-page story, all at the same time.

Delaney closed his InterContinetal hotel umbrella and let the cold spring rain wash over his face. Alcohol and confusion coursed through his brain. Under the lurid lime green and violet lights of the new Berlin, he tried, without success, to gather his spinning thoughts.

D
elaney, of course, slept very late the next morning in his giant hotel bed. The window shades were models of German efficiency and right until he slowly parted them just before noon the room remained tomb-black. He peered out, monstrously hung over, though the pale grey square of European light into the courtyard below and bitterly regretted, as always, the excesses of the night before.

He shuffled around for a time, sipping water, watching CNN, deciding against a restorative minibar beer. The message light on his telephone was flashing. Amazingly, it was a voicemail from Ackermann, older and far drunker the night before than Delaney, but already behind his desk at the newspaper.

“Ah, Francis, of course you are asleep, still,” Ackermann's voice thundered from the depths of the hotel messaging system. “Of course, of course, my delicate flower. I, on the other hand, was able to spring into action as usual at the very edge of dawn, the crack, perhaps you say in English. Newspapers do not get produced by those who remain late in bed, in case you have forgotten. Nor do criminals get arrested. The lovely Mareike has already been made aware of your request to discuss something important with her. I used my world-famous powers of persuasion to good effect. She can see you this evening at her flat in the fashionably seedy Friedrichshain neighbourhood. I will email you the address and telephone number because I would suppose you are too ill to use pen and paper just at the moment as you stand there in your pajamas feeling sorry for yourself and trying not to vomit. Am I correct? But she will see you; I have done what I promised. I will now, as I have nothing else to do here at the newspaper in an election year, attempt to persuade someone to let us look at the Heinrich autopsy report. We shall speak later, my friend. And bring Viagra for your meeting with Inspector Mareike Fischer. That is my advice.”

Delaney called Ackermann right back. “You amaze me, Gunter,” he said.

“That is what young Zynep said to me late last night as well, after the adventures that followed our return to her flat,” Ackermann said.

“So Mareike is willing to see me . . .”

“Of course.”

“She an ex-girlfriend or something?”

“She is everybody's ex-girlfriend, Francis. Most of LKA Berlin, a good random sample of media stars, others. She is that type.”

“Does she know what I want to talk about?”

“No. Do you?”

“Yes. Sort of.”

“Pull yourself together, my friend. This may break the case, as they say in the TV shows. Or it may show you are simply a hopeless paranoid.”

Delaney ordered room-service coffee. Food would have to wait until after his recovery. His email inbox was brimming with news, none terribly good, some very bad indeed.

From Rawson, the following:

Francis, it always really worries me when you go to ground like this. It worries all of us here. It's not really fair of you to share bits of information about something like the Klaus Heinrich thing and then go to ground, is it? Please get in contact as soon as possible to discuss. And how is Germany by the way? Our Thai friends have always been very helpful to us here at CSIS when we have some questions for them about people's movements. We note your departure from Bangkok airport a couple of nights ago. Presumably you have some pressing reason now to be in Germany? Can you let me know what hotel you are at to save us all a lot of further fussing around? Thanks and bests.

Delaney would reply to that later.

From Jonah Smith in Phuket, some quite bad news about bugging devices in his room at the Bay Hotel. Smith, too, it seemed, had been drinking to excess. His email sounded angry, somewhat desperate. There was also an element of fear in the text. Delaney replied to that one right away, using various phrases intended to soothe:

. . .
You'll have to just keep on being careful
, Delaney wrote . . .
Don't panic just yet. . . . The longer your list of potential enemies is, the more interesting the story actually becomes. Right? We're starting to develop a good little list of possible enemies now
. . .

From Tim Bishop, a workmanlike colleague's note:

Hey Frank, just FYI, back home in Paris now. Thought I couldn't justify hanging around out in Phuket any longer. Got some good shots of little Charlotte Stokke's funeral ceremony before I left. Standing by here if you need me for anything.

And from Kate Hunter of the RCMP, this message, workmanlike in a different way:

Dear Francis. I've been thinking a lot about a lot of things since our last phone conversation, or phone argument or whatever you want to call it. I think it would be good for us to stop all this now. It's already gone on far too long as it is, this situation, don't you think? It's not good for either of us anymore. Bye. Kate. Sorry to do this in an email.

Delaney was not sure there would be much use replying to that one at all.

Investigative journalist Francis Delaney was, therefore, in a somewhat end-of-the-world mood when he rang Mareike Fischer's doorbell that evening. He had sobered up, cleaned himself up, but a dark mood hung over him like a stubborn North Europe rain cloud. It was an appropriate mood in which to meet the most undercover member of Berlin's Landeskriminalamt undercover drug squad.

Inspector Fischer had worked so far undercover for so long that she now forgot, as Ackermann suggested, who she really was. Her apartment was in a rundown third-storey walk-up right on SimonDach-Strasse, the cacophonous main drag in a hodgepodge area of bars, restaurants, makeshift galleries, punk squatters and Turks. It was a place where police did not generally make themselves known.

The first thing any drug dealer or anybody else would notice about Mareike Fischer was her fantastical fairy-tale mane of flaming red hair. If she had been wearing it loose, it would surely have cascaded to the middle of her back. When Delaney arrived, it had been gathered into a giant pony-tail that was struggling to break its bonds.

She was almost exactly Delaney's height, and buxom, broad-shouldered, fit, tanned, alert. She was wearing a grey NYPD T-shirt and black jeans, both items clearly meant for someone far, far smaller. A diamond stud glittered in her right nostril. She locked eyes on Delaney's eyes after opening the door and did not let go. Her apartment smelled of incense.

“Gunter's favourite Canadian,” she said.

“Frank Delaney.”

“A solid Canadian name. Good and solid. Come in good, solid Gunter Canadian.”

The apartment was crammed, utterly, with big old pieces of wooden furniture and overstuffed upholstered sofas and armchairs. Books were piled on shelves and on the floor. Magazines, rolled-up posters, potted plants, flowers in various vases. A collection of masks hung on a wall—from Africa, Southeast Asia, the Venice carnival.

A small, expensive Teac stereo was playing Miles Davis very low. And a holstered Sig Sauer 9millimetre pistol sat on a sideboard. Mareike saw him looking at it.

“You like guns? That is standard LKA issue, the Sig nine millimetre.” “Not very undercover,” he said.

“I usually put it away when I have guests. Certain ones. Or I wear it under my shirt.”

She waited for Delaney to comment on how hard that would be to accomplish, at least today. “You didn't put it away for me,” he said.

“Gunter tells me you are a man of the world. To be trusted. Calm when around guns or under fire in Afghanistan and other places. Why put the gun away for you? I am a cop lady. You know this. Bang, bang, shoot, shoot. Another bad guy gone to heaven.”

They sat side by side in a very sixties red velour sofa. She pushed aside some magazines and placed a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and two small glasses on the heavy wooden coffee table. Delaney noted a small mirror with white dust and a singleedged razor blade on it among the debris on the table. She saw him looking at that too.

“Props. For my druggie act,” she said. “Yes?”

“Realistic,” he said.

“You're a user? Coke?” she said.

“No comment,” he said.

“Reporter man,” she said.

“And you? A user?”

“Only professionally,” she said. Her smile, when it broke open, completely illuminated her face.

The vodka helped extinguish the last of Delaney's hangover. It lubricated, as it was invented to do, any potentially tricky conversation between strangers. Delaney wanted to get right to the point, to pump Mareike for information and then get out of the apartment without getting drunk on vodka or stoned on cocaine or into some kind of complicated sexual snarl. But he circled the issues for a while, for form's sake. And because vodka in the early evening in an end-of-the-world Berlin apartment with a pretty red-haired woman actually suited his mood.

She told neighbourhood stories and some police stories. He told reporter stories and Gunter Ackermann stories. They drank and told stories and eventually Mareike signalled that smalltalk was to end—a policewoman after all.

“So now, we have a little vodka buzz, and we are friends, we have not been impolite to each other and now you will tell me why you need to talk to me. I will not be offended. I will not feel used and abused. You have done the right thing. We have waited the decent amount of time. I love Canadians. They are so polite.”

She touched him briefly on the side of his face.

“Go,” she said. “Tell me now.” Delaney put down his vodka glass.

“Your uncle,” he said.

“Ah,” she said.

“Ah,” Delaney said.

The vodka had increased his blood pressure as it was invented to do. His face burned slightly and he felt a pleasant pulse in his head.

“You are doing a story about my Uncle Ulrich.”

“No story. Not yet.”

“It's a very sad story, my Uncle Ulrich's story,” she said.

She had not put her vodka glass down. She drank another large shot, poured herself a refill. He eyes locked in again on Delaney's.

“I need to know why he resigned his job so suddenly,” Delaney said. “Gunter said you might be able to help me understand that.”

“You need to know, or you want to know?” she said.

“Both,” he said.

“I see,” she said. “For a story.”

“Not necessarily.”

“If not a story, then what?”

Despite Ackermann's suggestion, Delaney had really not prepared very well for this interview, if that is what it could be called. He had not decided beforehand how much of the tsunami story he would share with Mareike Fischer, how much she would need to know before deciding whether to help him.

He hesitated. Mareike did not.

“My uncle was treated very badly by the BKA at the end, Frank Delaney,” she said. “The police eat you up when you make a mistake. They will eat me up one day. I am making lots of mistakes. I enjoy making such mistakes. But they will eat me up eventually when I make one mistake too many.” The giant smile again illuminated her face. “Why should I tell you secrets about my uncle?” she asked.

“Because I'm someone who can tell his story, maybe. Would that be enough? I can help you tell people that he was treated unfairly.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“It's what I do, when I can,” Delaney said.

“And in this case, it would help me understand something even bigger, maybe.”

The vodka, or the end-of-the-world mood, or any number of other things, loosened his tongue and he, quite unwisely perhaps, told her a little—far from everything, but a little—about the tsunami file, and the Klaus Heinrich connection.

“Now I need to know if there is a connection between your uncle, or your uncle's resigning, and Klaus Heinrich,” Delaney said.

“An intriguing question,” Mareike said.

“But do you know the answer?” Delaney said. The giant smile.

“Some of it,” she said. “But maybe not enough of it. No one has asked me about this for a long time. And no one has actually asked it in quite this way.

There was never a tsunami in the background.” “So was there a connection?”

“Why do people always think there has to be a special connection between things?” she asked. “Police, journalists. Why can't things just happen here and there, just like that?”

“There's just too much of a coincidence between the big Heinrich story—he dies suddenly in a fire—and your uncle's story. The head of the German federal police resigns suddenly, just like that, at almost the same time. I just have this strong feeling there must be some kind of connection.”

Delaney then for some reason thought it appropriate that evening to say: “I was in love with a psychologist in Montreal once who really believed there were significant connections a lot of the time between seemingly unrelated events. She thought you just had to look at things properly to see this. Synchronicity. The so-called acausal connecting principle. She was a Jungian.”

Natalia had also frequently said that the connections people start to see could tell you just as much about a person's psychological state as about the situation itself. Delaney didn't at all know what she might have said that night about his current psychological state.